The following relates generally to wireless communication, and more specifically to techniques for reference signal transmission and averaging for different services in wireless communications systems.
Wireless communication systems are widely deployed to provide various types of communication content such as voice, video, packet data, messaging, broadcast, and so on. These systems may be multiple-access systems capable of supporting communication with multiple users by sharing the available system resources (e.g., time, frequency, and power). Examples of such multiple-access systems include code-division multiple access (CDMA) systems, time-division multiple access (TDMA) systems, frequency-division multiple access (FDMA) systems, and orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) systems.
By way of example, a wireless multiple-access communication system may include a number of base stations, each supporting communication for multiple communication devices, otherwise known as user equipments (UEs). A base station may communicate with UEs on downlink channels (e.g., for transmissions from a base station to a UE) and uplink channels (e.g., for transmissions from a UE to a base station).
These multiple access technologies have been adopted in various telecommunication standards to provide a common protocol that enables different wireless devices to communicate on a municipal, national, regional, and even global level. An example telecommunication standard is Long Term Evolution (LTE). LTE is designed to improve spectral efficiency, lower costs, improve services, make use of new spectrum, and better integrate with other open standards. LTE may use OFDMA on the downlink (DL), single-carrier frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA) on the uplink (UL), and multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antenna technology.
As technology advances, some more advanced mobile devices within a wireless communications network may have capabilities for communications transmitted according to different timing characteristics relative to legacy mobile devices that operate within the network. In some instances, reference signals may be transmitted between a base station and a UE, in order to assist with estimating channel conditions and reliably receiving and decoding transmissions. According to traditional deployments, certain types of reference signals, such as demodulation reference signals (DM-RS), may not be combinable due to potential different precoding that may be applied to different instances of a DM-RS. In certain situations, it may be desirable to provide flexibility in combining different types of reference signals of a wireless communications network based on different mobile devices that operate according to different timing characteristics.